Top Five Interesting Facts About the Milky Way Galaxy BY: GUIDO BAECHLER
5: Structure And Size Of The Milky Way Galaxy The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy with a center bulge that is surrounded by four arms that are wrapped around it. Our galaxy, as well as our solar system, is always rotating. While our solar system travels around 515,000 miles-perhour on average, it would still take approximately 230 million years to travel around the Milky Way.
Guido Baechler
4: The Andromeda Galaxy Will Eventually Collide With The Milky Way The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will eventually collide into each other, but it won’t happen for a very long time. While it was previously thought that it would happen 3.75 billion years from now, newly conducted research from the ESA’s Gaia mission estimates the collision will take place in 4.5 billion years.
Guido Baechler
3: There Are Hundreds Of Billions Of Stars In Our Galaxy It’s tough to know exactly how many stars there are in our galaxy since the halo around the Milky Way also contains many stars. In addition, the center of our galaxy has a galactic bulge that’s filled with dust, stars, and gas, as well as a supermassive black hole which makes that area extremely thick with materials that telescopes are unable to see through it. Guido Baechler
2: There Are Almost 4,000 Exoplanets In Our Galaxy Planets that are beyond our solar system are called exoplanets and thousands have been discovered by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope over the past several years. These exoplanets can be any size, with some being rocky and others having icy surfaces. The Kepler Space Telescope worked to find these planets from 2009 until 2018.
Guido Baechler
1: Milky Way Is Only One Of Hundreds Of Billions Of Galaxies In The Universe Hanford and its nearby areas were so saturated with radioactive waste and strange toxic sludges that the site became the largest nuclear cleanup site in the entire western hemisphere. The cleanup process has gone on for decades, caused health problems to dozens of workers, and cost billions of dollars, but the treatment plant that’s meant to deal with the sludge is yet to materialize. Guido Baechler